GOProud and CPAC: "After the Ball"

In 1987, homosexual activists Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen penned a provocative manifesto entitled "The Overhauling of Straight America", which was published in Guide Magazine, a homosexual publication. Their essay outlined an aggressive agenda to popularize acceptance of homosexuality. The co-authors further developed their plan of "subversion" and "propaganda" (their words) in their 1989 book, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear & Hatred of Gays in the 90s.

"Gays must launch a large-scale campaign," this deviant duo declared, "... to reach straights through the mainstream media." "We're talking about propaganda," wrote Kirk and Madsen. They then described in detail a sophisticated and insidious scheme to use the media to "convert" America by enveloping the culture in pro-homosexual messages. "By conversion we actually mean something far more profoundly threatening to the American way of life," the pervert propagandists boasted. "We mean conversion of the average American's emotions, mind and will, through a planned psychological attack, in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media. We mean 'subverting' the mechanism of prejudice to our own ends — using the very processes that made America hate us to turn their hatred into warm regard — whether they like it or not."

Kirk and Madsen wrote that the "fastest way to convince straights that homosexuality is commonplace is to get a lot of people talking about the subject in a neutral or supportive way. Open, frank talk makes gayness seem less furtive." This is important, they said, to get straight folks to the "shoulder-shrug stage." The radical homo duo, who had trained in public relations and neuropsychiatry, believed that "if you can get them to think that [homosexuality] is just another thing — meriting no more than a shrug of the shoulders — then your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won."

The profound revolution Kirk and Madsen methodically spelled out has been implemented to the letter by virtually all of the major media. The success of their strategy is obvious in the omnipresent "gay" programming in television entertainment today and the adoption of the "gay rights" banner by so many Democratic and Republican politicians.

One of the most disturbing manifestations of the success of the Kirk-Madsen strategy is the inclusion of GOProud, the so-called "conservative gay" organization, as a co-sponsor of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) convention in Washington, D.C., February 10-12.

The decision to bring the GOProud homosexual activists into the CPAC "big tent" has not been without controversy. Many of the "social conservative" groups — the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, the American Principles Project, American Values, the Capital Research Center, the Center for Military Readiness, Liberty Counsel, and others — that have been past participants at CPAC dropped out in response to this cave-in on a matter of fundamental concern. Many others who remained inside CPAC this year are questioning whether they will do so in the future if the organization continues to court the homosexual movement.

Has CPAC Been "Overhauled"?

The GOProud booth in the huge Exhibition Hall of the Washington Marriott Wardman Park provides an odd and jarring juxtaposition to many of the groups around it. Two booths down from GOProud is the booth of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), which publishes many of the works of Dr. Russell Kirk, considered by many to be the intellectual godfather of the conservative movement. The two booths on the other side of ISI belong to The John Birch Society/The New American/Liberty News Network. Across from them and only a few paces from GOProud is Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum.

The late Russell Kirk is regularly and reverentially invoked by many of the CPAC leaders and his 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, is often cited as one of the seminal works of conservative thought. The ISI booth prominently features Kirk's books and a handsome, glossy poster entitled, "Russell Kirk's Ten Conservative Principles." The first principle in the Kirkian Decalogue states: "The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order."

In The Conservative Mind and his other works, Kirk delineated the basis of this moral order in the natural law and the divine law. In this, Russell Kirk was following the tradition of our nation's Founding Fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in the Declaration of Independence, that our rights are grounded in "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God." Our nation's founders recognized that sodomy is a gross violation of the natural law (see here).

Thomas Jefferson, in many ways one of the most liberal of the founders, was not a "gay rights" advocate by any means. In a letter to Edmund Pendleton Jefferson wrote: "Punishments I know are necessary, & I would provide them, strict & inflexible, but proportioned to the crime... Rape, buggery, etc., — punish by castration."

Like most of our founders, Jefferson was influenced by the English common law and Sir William Blackstone's famous Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765). Blackstone described sodomy as the "infamous crime against nature ... the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature." It is, he said "a crime not fit to be named." Homosexuality, Blackstone noted, is a gross crime condemned "by the voice of nature and of reason, and the express law of God."

Today this "infamous crime" is being enshrined as a right, and champions of law and morality are in danger of being prosecuted for "hate crimes." And too many "conservatives" are caving in to political correctness on this issue.

GOProud and its Republican enablers are selling the message that conservatives can "win" politically by allying themselves with homosexuals who claim to be fiscally conservative, as if a supposed allegiance to federal budget reductions and lower marginal tax rates should trump all moral issues.

Our Founding Fathers would reject this perverse pragmatism that would redefine immorality and call it conservativism.

George Washington, in his famous Farewell Address of 1796 said:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens.... And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.... Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Patrick Henry had this to say on the subject:

Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is impossible that a nation of infidels or idolaters should be a nation of free men. It is when a people forget God, that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.

John Adams, our second president, said this in his Address to the Military, 11 October 1798:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.

The great British statesman Edmund Burke, an admirer of American constitutionalism, and a hero to many of the founders of CPAC, stated in 1791:

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, - in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Tragically, many self-proclaimed conservatives are in danger of vindicating the wisdom of these men by the perilous choices of political expediency they are making today.